A Pilgrim Voyage

Thanksgiving brings us thoughts of the comforts of home, but the holiday exists today thanks to the arrival of the Pilgrims on these shores, and their trip here was a long way from comfortable. They braved the North Atlantic, sailing here on a tubby little wooden sailing ship named the Mayflower. Sixty-seven days at sea to reach New England, with about 130 people crammed into a tiny vessel with no sanitation or running water, no privacy, under horrendous conditions-it sounds like the stuff of legends.

Was it really that bad, we might wonder, or has the story grown with the telling? After all, it was so long ago; still, we can make a pretty good guess, because tied up on the waterfront of Plymouth, Massachusetts, is the Mayflower II, a replica of the original that was built in the 1950s to be as authentic as possible-and then sailed under her own canvas from England to America just like her namesake.

The replica itself is a half-century old now. Every attempt has been made, through careful research, to keep her as close as possible to what the Pilgrims made their grim but hopeful voyage in. A visit is an eye-opening experience. From the moment one steps aboard, everything looks so small-130 people would be a crowd on an afternoon sail around the harbor, yet the Pilgrims spent over two months here with all their supplies. In fact, the crew wanted them confined below the decks for the duration of the passage in order to keep the main deck clear for ship handling.

The cabins that one sees at either end of the main deck weren't for the passengers. The 18 crew members, the boatswain and the cook occupied the little fo'c's'l, or forecastle, in the bow, which also contained the ship's stove. The aft cabins include the steerage where the ship's officers lived. No comforts here-the very word steerage eventually came to connote the lowest class of accommodation available on passenger ships. It's a single, low-ceilinged room that the officers shared with the helmsman, who steered the ship from here with a whipstaff attached to the tiller. Officers on the deck above would shout their steering orders down through a hatch in the deck to the helmsman.

Behind steerage was the "great cabin" of Mayflower's master. He shared this cramped little space with another officer. Above this was the roundhouse, the uppermost cabin in the ship's stern. This cubbyhole was used as a combination of chartroom and cabin for the mate. Its location high above the sea was no benefit, since the ship's motion was exaggerated here. The captain who brought the Mayflower II across the Atlantic occupied this cabin and commented in an article written after the crossing, "... the motion in my tiny cabin, high in the highest end of the great aftercastle, was so violent that it was a strenuous exercise to stay in there, awake or asleep."

The lowest deck in the ship is the hold, which was stuffed full of cargo and ship's supplies. This left only the 'tweendecks for the entire future colony of Pilgrims to inhabit-along with their animals and the disassembled pieces of the shallop, or work boat, that they were bringing to America with them.

It was a common space, a single, low, dark room. Crude bunks were built along the sides of the hold (the ship was a merchantman and had no facilities for passengers), and the space of a single bunk would have to contain an entire family. Privacy, such as it was, was provided by curtains or blankets hung on a string to screen the bunk from open view.

Besides the presence of the livestock, there were no bathing or sanitary facilities beyond chamber pots or pails, and the continual seasickness of many of the passengers would have contributed to a ghastly stench that all were forced to live with. There would be constant wetness, because these old ships weren't rigid creations; they "worked" as the ship rolled, allowing water to penetrate between the planks and around the imperfectly caulked cannon ports.

Sixty-seven days of this-and yet once Mayflower dropped anchor in Plymouth Harbor, the passengers were reluctant to leave her. This stinking, crowded, rolling prison was now the security of the known in an unknown world. It had become home, and the crew, anxious to return to England, had to winter over while the Pilgrims slowly prepared a common house ashore to move into.

Of the 101 passengers who arrived in Plymouth, almost half were dead before Mayflower finally departed in the spring. The privations of their first years here are well known, but it is worth remembering, as we sit down to our Thanksgiving dinner, what they endured in getting here. A visit aboard Mayflower II today can make real to us the hardships that ordinary-or perhaps extraordinary-people went through to start a new life here.

Article provided by Homesteader